Page 12 of My Brother's Best Friend

I ripped off my clothes and stepped into the shower, turning on the cold water to ground myself.

When I was younger, I used to do it for my anxiety attacks, but it wasn’t working now.

I slammed my fist into the tiled wall and split my knuckles. “Fuck!”

I needed to get out of here. I couldn’t breathe. My head was spinning again. My hands shaky.

Nobody could see me like this.

So, I wrapped a towel around my waist—because I wasn’t putting those filthy clothes back on—and hung another towel over my head, then hurried down the long hallways until I found Maddie’s room. I didn’t want her to see me like this, but everyone knew that this room was off-limits during parties.

It was the only damn place that I could go.

My breaths were short, ragged. I could barely breathe. I grabbed the doorknob with a shaky hand and yanked it open, hurrying into the room and locking the door behind me. I placed my back against it and sank down to the floor, shoving my hands through my hair.

“I wanted it,” I said to convince myself, rocking back and forth. “I was too drunk to remember that I … that I …” I wanted to finish the sentence withasked her to do that,but all I remembered was telling her to crawl off me.

I couldn’t even remember who the fuck it was.

Did she get me hard? Did I come inside her without a condom?

I crawled over to Maddie’s bed and used the rest of my strength to hoist myself up onto the mattress.

She wasn’t here.Why isn’t she here?

I pulled one of her pillows to my chest and sank my nose into it, inhaling her vanilla shampoo deeply. My shoulders relaxed slightly, and the facade that I had desperately attempted to hold up slowly faded.

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

Fuck!

Heavy tears threatened to spill down my cheeks.

“I didn’t want it,” I murmured. “I didn’t fucking want it.”

CHAPTER7

MADDIE

“So, do you think that lover boy will be down to see you today?” I asked, leaning against the front counter in the library on Saturday morning as Vera checked in books that had been dropped off last night.

Vera arched a dark brown brow at me. “No.”

I hummed and smirked at her. “Suuure.”

With a small smile on her face, she continued to scan in the books and ignored me, which meant that Blaise Harleen—Redwood Academy’s bad boy—would probably show up at the library at some point today to flirt with Vera.

“I have to work,” she said, lifting her gaze to me. “You can’t loom over me all day.”

“Pleeeease,” I begged. “I don’t want to go back home.”

She stared at me blankly. “Maddie, you literally live in a mansion. All you have to do is enter through one of your thousand side doors and make it into your room before Alec even sees you. Plus, I doubt that he’s still there.” She looked down at her computer. “It’s ten.”

“You don’t understand,” I said, summoning my inner drama queen. “Those boys sleep in until two in the afternoon on the weekends. They’re probably littered around my house with a bunch of girls and beer all over them.”

“Vera!” an older woman called from the bookshelves in the back. “Can you help me with these books?”

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